


Head for Heights

by Sholio



Series: The Epic Post-Series Road Trip of DOOM [11]
Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Altitude sickness, Childhood Trauma, Gen, Hiding Medical Issues, Hurt/Comfort, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-01-05 15:45:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18369086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: God only knew how many cases of the flu, how many colds and every other goddamn kind of thing Ward had pushed himself through, because the only kind of sympathy he ever got from Harold was one of those pitying/scornful looks:You can't even keep from catching a cold? Really? Oh, stop complaining, Ward. Be a man. I got a full day's work done while I was dying of cancer. There are things I need you to do; you can get them done with a little case of the sniffles.





	Head for Heights

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



The ruins -- if ruins they were: crumbling yes; abandoned, perhaps not so much -- clung to a mountainside with the vast sweeping heights of the Himalayas rising around them. There was so much _up_ in this place, Ward thought, sitting on a rock cairn with a water bottle in his hand and watching Danny scramble mountain-goat-like to a higher outcropping where there was a square slot in the hillside like a doorway. The whole place was vertical. You climbed part of it and then you just found out that there was a whole lot more of it to climb.

He had a splitting headache. Danny had lectured him very seriously, in the village down the winding mountain path they'd just climbed, about altitude sickness and staying hydrated and _Tell me right away if you don't feel up to this, okay, Ward?_ And Ward had rolled his eyes and said sure, because what _else_ was he going to say? Especially when Danny was bouncing all over the place like a goddamn ibex.

Although there was no sign of anyone nearby and from all outward appearances the place could have been abandoned for years, colorful prayer flags fluttered in the breeze. Long strings of them trailed from the spires of the ruins, from rock cairns and poles. Some were faded and wind-torn, others so bright they must have been strung up in the last few days.

Other than that, the only sign of humans anywhere nearby were a group of kids down the mountain a little ways, herding scruffy goats or sheep; it was hard to tell from up here, especially since Ward was no expert on livestock. Their high voices carried up the mountainside, calling to each other and laughing.

Below them, the mountainside fell away, shockingly far. The village looked like a cluster of toys from up here, and even the village itself was pretty damn high. Getting here had been a two-day journey. They'd hitched a ride with a truck driver in Kathmandu carrying animal feed in the back of a canvas-covered, brightly painted truck, creaking and groaning its way up a winding mountain road that was one lane wide with no guardrail ...

Chasing rumors. Seeking stories of the Iron Fist, tales of lost cities. Ward rested a hiking boot on the stone cairn, threw his arm over his knee, and looked up at the hillside above him, at the crumbling buildings with their fluttering prayer flags, a kaleidoscope of color dancing in the ever-present breeze. He knew what Danny was doing, that was the thing; the monkey on Danny's back, that had driven them halfway around the world, was a beast he knew well. Cover it in all the mystical mumbo-jumbo you want, but what Danny was doing was chasing a high.

But hell, who was he to throw stones? At least helping Danny hunt down the source of his addiction kept Ward away from his own.

_We're a matched set, all right._

God, his head hurt. He lay back on the sun-warmed stones, gazing up at the vivid blue sky. He'd hoped his heart would stop pounding its way out of his chest after he took a rest, but that didn't seem to be the case, and he was still gasping for air. The air was just so thin up here.

He had been teeth-grittingly determined not to show Danny how much the climb was wearing on him, particularly since Danny didn't seem to be having any trouble at all, but when they'd finally hit this rock he just needed to _stop_ , and he'd said so.

"Yeah, you're right," Danny had said (barely out of breath at all, the jerk), dropping into a folded-legged crouch on the grass. He'd waved at Ward's water bottle. "Drink something."

"You too." Ward was nauseated from the climb, and dizzy. People weren't supposed to be exerting themselves at this kind of altitude; it was unnatural. (It didn't help that one of the little goatherd girls had skipped past them while they were climbing the trail, easily outdistancing both of them.)

"Seriously, you're okay?"

"I'm fine," he'd said. A headache wasn't worth stopping for. God only knew how many cases of the flu, how many colds and every other goddamn kind of thing he'd pushed himself through, because the only kind of sympathy he ever got from Harold was one of those pitying/scornful looks: _You can't even keep from catching a cold? Really? Oh, stop complaining, Ward. Be a man. I got a full day's work done while I was dying of cancer. There are things I need you to do; you can get them done with a little case of the sniffles._

He'd gone in to work with a 104-degree fever; he'd put in a full day's work while suffering from a case of food poisoning when he couldn't even keep water down. And it wasn't like he thought Danny would laugh at him, or mock his manhood. Danny wasn't Harold; Danny was pretty much the anti-Harold. But it was just ... embarrassing. Danny was slightly winded, and moving at probably about 2/3 his usual level of cheerful golden-retriever bounce, but he was still bright-eyed and enthusiastic and totally up for scrambling all over the mountainside. Ward refused to be the weak link here. He'd managed to keep Danny from noticing his first and so far only case of (mild) food poisoning on the trip; he wasn't going to keel over from a little shortness of breath.

Still, he wasn't especially enthusiastic about getting up off this pile of rocks once he'd sat down on it.

As if summoned by Ward's reflections, Danny came trotting down from his investigations of the higher mountain reaches. "The lady back in the tea shop was right," he said, throwing himself down on the grass and reaching for the water bottle he'd abandoned beside his day pack. "There are carvings up there, I can see 'em, but they're up another trail." He kept having to pause for breath; at least he wasn't completely unaffected.

"Yay," Ward said bleakly.

Danny frowned up at him. "You okay? You look pale."

"Just getting my mountain legs," he said, and Danny laughed.

"Hey, tell you what. If you want to sit here for awhile, I'll go up and check out those carvings. I'll take pictures."

"I'm fine." Ward hoisted himself up off the cairn. "Lead on."

"You're sure?" Danny said, frowning up at him. "Ward, _tell_ me if you don't feel good, okay? Altitude sickness is nothing to mess around with. Trust me, I know."

Yeah, sure he did. Danny looked like he'd never met a mountain he didn't want to climb. "I'm not sick," Ward said, as he'd said to Harold on more than one occasion. "Just needed a breather. Let's go find the damn carvings or whatever."

"You really don't have to come along if you don't want to," Danny said, somewhat testily, but he smiled then; Danny never stayed mad for long. He scrambled to his feet and reached for the day pack with water and snacks and sunscreen. He'd been mostly carrying that, too, which Ward would feel more like arguing about if he wasn't having enough trouble getting _himself_ up the mountain.

"I know that," Ward said, short with irritation because Danny was right, damn it; he could have been casually lounging around down in the village, nursing his headache in peace, and instead he was up here with this rock-climbing idiot for some stupid reason.

(Said rock-climbing idiot's general tendency to throw himself into danger being a large part of that. Ward would rather follow Danny around on the mountainside in the sunshine than go looking for him after dark if he got distracted by something and didn't come back, which was depressingly likely. Danny's whole attitude toward life could basically be summed up by: SQUIRREL!!)

"Yeah, well ..." Danny gave him another look that was a little too insightful. Ward made himself straighten up and look like he was perfectly rested, _thank you._ "If we need to turn around and go back, you'll tell me, right?"

"Sure," Ward said.

 

***

 

Danny set a slow pace going up the hill, which Ward knew was for his benefit and would have annoyed him a lot more if he'd been able to spare the energy for annoyance; it was taking all he had just to get up the damn hill.

Still, once they got through the slot in the rocks, he couldn't keep a breathless _"Whoa"_ from slipping out.

There was a whole valley up here, invisible from below. And Danny (and the tea lady) were right, there were carvings on the rocky valley sides, along with more fluttering prayer flags and simple stone-masonry whaddya-call-em, stupas, silhouetted against the rising blue peaks above the valley. There were also more herd kids with their animals on the grassy valley floor, including a little girl riding a donkey, her bare feet dangling down, herding honest-to-God yaks. Ward wondered if Danny had herded yaks as a kid in K'un Lun, but he couldn't get the breath to ask.

"See?" Danny said. He turned around, his face changed somewhat, and then, to Ward's disgruntled surprise, pushed him down to sit on a boulder beside the trail. "Okay, _stay here._ You can see me just fine from there. I'm gonna climb up and get a better look at those."

"I don't see what me being able to see you has anything to do with it!" he tried to yell after him, but it came out a breathy wheeze. Ward decided that sitting down was the better part of discretion, or whatever.

His head hurt with migraine intensity. He took another sip of water, but it made his stomach lurch. He set the bottle down beside the day pack and leaned back, resting his hands on the sun-warmed rock.

Danny paused to look back and wave -- Ward waved back -- and then stopped to chat with the kid on the donkey. Ward watched Danny crouch down, pick some flowers, and weave them quickly into a flower crown that he placed on her head, making her convulse in giggles. A flower crown for the donkey followed.

Typical, Ward thought. Danny had been making friends everywhere they went, especially with the kids, who were generally shy but opened up quickly once Danny started doing little magic tricks for them or giving them candy. By evening there would probably be a little crowd of them around their hostel.

Where he wished he was now. Setting down the water bottle hadn't made him any less nauseated; in fact, it was getting worse. A wave of sickness washed over him, and for a minute he thought he really was going to get sick. He didn't, but it made the pounding pain in his temples skyrocket. 

As he leaned over with his fingers curled into the rough texture of the rock, he thought dazedly that coming up here probably wasn't the best idea he'd ever had.

He mostly just felt _exhausted._ It was the kind of sick, dizzy tiredness you got when you desperately need to lie down but can't. He slipped off the boulder and sat with his back against it, leaning his head back, and that was a little better, except for the way that his heart felt like it was trying to beat its way out of his chest.

It seemed like it should be easier to catch his breath now that he was sitting down, but it wasn't -- which made him worry about Danny, who might deal better with the altitude, but was also moving around _way_ too much. He opened his eyes to see where Danny was, and yep, halfway up the side of the valley and still climbing, a little moving dot. Idiot.

Ward tried to get to his feet, but all he managed was a vague lurch in that direction before he sank back against the rock. Okay, maybe staying here was a good idea after all. He could collect his energy and be ready to head back down the mountain when Danny got tired of looking at ancient, crumbling rocks. Or fell off the damn hill he was on.

Ward let his head drop back against the boulder, and closed his eyes. The next thing he knew, someone was shaking him, making his headache escalate unbearably. He jerked awake, gasping for air.

"Ward!" Danny was crouched in front of him, looking desperately worried. He shook Ward's shoulder again, and then took both Ward's hands in his own. "You're really cold. And really pale. Why didn't you _say_ something?"

Damned if you do, damned if you don't, he thought, and from the way Danny's face got even more worried, he realized he'd said it out loud. That was the problem, though: the rules changed, you didn't know the new rules, you got yelled at no matter what ...

"I'm not yelling. Ward, you're freaking me out. We gotta get you back down to the village, where the elevation's lower. You can _die_ from altitude sickness, you know that?"

Danny put an arm around him and got him on his feet, where Ward clung to him, gasping. "This isn't going to work," Danny muttered. "You can't walk like this. Okay ... just ... stay here and keep breathing, all right?"

He lowered Ward back to the grass and took off before Ward could gather the breath for the sarcastic reply that comment deserved. In moments Danny was back, leading the little girl's donkey. It still had a lopsided flower crown tilted over one ear.

Propping himself dizzily on his elbows in the grass, Ward looked up at Danny and the donkey, and said flatly, "No."

"Ward, c'mon, you can barely stand up; walking is just going to make you worse."

"I'm not riding back into town --" He had to pause to gasp for breath. 

"Are you really going to put up a fight about this?"

"... on a donkey wearing a flower crown," he finished doggedly, between gasps.

Danny took off the flower crown, hesitated, and then, with a quick flash of a grin, dropped it on Ward's head. Ward glared at him. Danny held a hand down to him.

"Get on the damn donkey, Ward."

Danny's face had set in stubborn lines that were all too familiar and probably meant that if Ward refused, he was going to find himself picked up and put on the donkey by main force. He let Danny grasp his hand and help him up (gently, with a hand planted on his back to keep him stable) and then discovered that getting onto the donkey was easier said than done. The boulder worked as a mounting block, and when he finally managed to get his legs around the donkey's fat barrel (toes nearly touching the ground), he slumped over its neck and clutched its stubby mane to keep from sliding right back off again. Being vertical was not good. Laying down sounded better.

"Drink some water," Danny said, thrusting the bottle at him. "Dehydration makes it worse."

"Don't want to." He pushed it back at Danny. The only thing worse than being on a donkey, he suspected, would be throwing up on a donkey. "I can't believe you stole a little girl's donkey. Or did you buy it?"

"Neither." Danny reached for the donkey's rope halter. "I _borrowed_ it. She said I could."

Ward decided not to ask how Danny had managed to pick up enough of the local language to negotiate donkey-borrowing in just the short time they'd been here, because languages were another thing Danny seemed to be talented at. What he wasn't good at was donkey-wrangling. The donkey decided first of all that it wasn't particularly happy about having a stranger on its back; second, that it wanted to graze; and finally, when Danny tried to lead it out of the valley, that it had absolutely no intention of going anywhere. They ended up wandering in a series of tight circles. Despite his physical misery, Ward wasn't above being amused at Danny's obvious and escalating annoyance.

"Apparently donkeys aren't susceptible to your charms," he said, resting his cheek on the fist clenched in the donkey's mane and watching, sideways, as Danny try to back the donkey up from the side path it had tried to wander down. Danny grabbed its halter in both hands and pushed on its face. The donkey tried to bite him.

"Shut up, Ward," Danny said between his teeth.

"You could try kung fu. I bet donkeys don't know kung fu."

"Didn't really get along with the donkeys in K'un Lun, either," Danny muttered, trying to untangle himself from the donkey's lead rope.

"They should've taught you donkey-fu."

"Ward, I swear ..."

By the time Danny managed to get the donkey straightened out, Ward had regained a little energy and renewed his insistence on walking down the mountain under his own power. Danny gave up on the donkey idea, helped him down, and turned the donkey loose to go back to its mistress. It made a relieved beeline away from them.

"You're sure you can do this?" Danny asked, with Ward's arm looped over his shoulders. "Never mind, I don't even know why I'm asking."

"I'm all right."

"You keep saying that. I don't think that word means what you think it means."

It seemed to Ward that he was a little less short of breath than he had been after the climb, though he was still dizzy, weak, and nauseated. They stopped frequently to rest while Danny tried to inflict sips of water on him.

During one of those stops, Danny said quietly, "You know, I'm not Harold."

Ward was flopped on the grass, staring up at the sky so he didn't have to look at the mountains spinning gently around him; now he turned his head to the side so he could see Danny, who was regarding him with yet another variation on the twenty shades of worried looks he'd been giving Ward all the way down the mountain. "Yeah, I hadn't noticed."

"You know what I mean. I'm not going to ..." Danny waved his hands as if he could catch words out of the air to describe the shape of the concept he wanted. "... whatever Harold did, I mean, I can guess, but -- it _scares_ me, Ward, that it'd get this bad and you wouldn't say anything, and it makes me wonder what else you aren't telling me --"

"Danny."

"Yes," Danny said, dropping his hands into his lap.

"Please stop talking."

"Okay," Danny said meekly, and got up, and got him back on his feet again.

Ward was powering through on sheer stubbornness when they got back to the village. Danny deposited him gently on a bed in the hostel, vanished before Ward could ask where he was going, and was back shortly with the nurse from the village's clinic, who had a portable oxygen bottle and a handful of pills.

Ward was skeptical whether it would really make a difference, but the difference was astonishing; his splitting headache and the wet, heavy feeling in his chest began to diminish as soon as he put the oxygen mask on. He meekly took the pills and lay back with his eyes closed, letting the low conversation in the room -- the nurse's limited English, the familiar rise and fall of Danny's voice -- wash over him. He was drifting, almost asleep, when Danny shook his shoulder. "You feel a little better?"

"A lot," Ward admitted, pulling the oxygen mask down to talk. His voice sounded raspy, and now that the nausea had begun to fade, he was starting to become aware of a raging thirst. "Is that water bottle around here somewhere?"

Danny broke into a relieved grin and handed it to him. "I'm going to get something to eat. I'll bring it back to the room. Think you could eat?"

Ward shrugged, and drifted again, vaguely aware of Danny patting his shoulder and then moving quietly away. He must have slept, because he woke with a crick in his neck and late afternoon sunshine slanting through the calico curtains half-covering the room's small window. Danny was sitting beside the bed on the floor, with a couple of bowls next to him, eyes closed and legs folded lotus-style, meditating.

"You ever fall asleep doing that?"

Danny's mouth twitched; his eyes stayed closed, but after a little while he said, "All the time, in K'un Lun. It was a good way to catch a nap without getting caught." He opened his eyes, unfolded his legs, and grinned at Ward. "I brought you some dal bhat and roti. It might be cold by now."

"I'm not really hungry." Ward sat up slowly and carefully, leaned his back against the wall, and reached for the water bottle. After he'd managed to wash the taste of "something died in here" out of his mouth, he became aware of Danny hopefully nudging the bowl closer to him, rolled his eyes, and took it. He _wasn't_ hungry, but he hadn't eaten all day and that was probably contributing to the lethargy and tiredness. He nibbled on a flatbread.

"How do you feel?" Danny asked.

"Better. Some." His head still hurt, but not the buzz-saw migraine from earlier, and he was short of breath but not drowning-on-dry-land desperate. It was more of a hollowed-out feeling now, like getting over the flu or a bad hangover. 

Somewhat guiltily, he realized Danny had spent the entire day babysitting him, never mind the reason why they were here in the first place. 

"Did you find out anything from the carvings?" he asked, poking at the dal bhat with a rolled-up flatbread. _Before I keeled over like the heroine in a bad melodrama and you had to carry me down a mountain, that is._

"Not really. I didn't have much time to look -- but I don't really think the temple here is related to the ones in K'un Lun. I might go back tomorrow and take a better look."

"Sorry for wrecking the day," Ward muttered, pushing around the rice in his bowl.

"Ward, you could have _died._ The clinic nurse was telling me about how they sometimes get hikers, healthy young people in really good shape, who just collapse and die. You can die in hours. It can make your brain swell until you go into a coma and don't wake up, or your lungs fill up with fluid and you drown -- she said that was starting to happen to you --"

"Thanks," Ward said. He pushed away the bowl now that he'd completely lost his appetite.

"Sorry." Danny leaned back against the opposite bed; the room was small, the space between the beds narrow. "I ... look ... Ward ..."

He trailed off. There was an awkward silence. Ward picked up a piece of flatbread to give himself something to do with his hands. "I hate being the weak link," he said, to the wall more than to Danny.

"You're not."

"Yeah? This altitude isn't bothering _you."_

"It used to," Danny said, and Ward glanced at him. "When I first came to K'un Lun ... I was really sick. Exposure was part of it, from when they found me on the mountainside. I probably would've lost my hands and feet to frostbite if they hadn't had ways to help me. But it was also the altitude, and that part, I just had to get through on my own. It took forever, it seemed like, for me to acclimatize to it. It drove me crazy, even though Davos was really patient with me. I think he thought I was slow and weak and stupid, and you know, I kind of _was_ , by the standards of what they expected for kids in K'un Lun, because I never really _had_ done the things they expected kids to do. But it was also just that my body was really having to struggle to cope with what Davos and most of the others had grown up with. Lei-Kung told me that, but I guess I didn't really understand what he was talking about until eventually, I just ... did it." 

He turned his head, looking up at Ward in the dim room. "I've always been pretty much okay with high altitudes ever since then. I guess it's possible I physically changed my body to deal with it better. I was awfully young when I got there, and kids are really adaptable. Plus chi, and ... you know. K'un Lun. So I guess what I'm saying is, it was stupid of me to put you in danger by expecting you to keep up with me. I just didn't _think._ I was here with Colleen, but she went through training not too different from mine. You shouldn't be expected to --"

"Danny," Ward said, finally managing to squeeze a word in. "My damage isn't your fault. None of this is your fault."

"Well, yeah, I know that, but --"

"You weren't wrong." He forced the words out; it was embarrassing to talk about, but this was Danny, the least judgmental person that Ward had ever met. "About Harold. For me, getting sick was -- it was proof, I guess, that I wasn't the man he wanted me to be. He never stopped reminding me that he hadn't been sick for so much as a day since he came back --"

"Can the undead catch colds?" Danny's voice was light, but his hands flexed on his knees, the tendons standing out in the backs. He was clearly fighting back fury.

"I don't know." It had actually never occurred to Ward to wonder. "I guess I never saw him with so much as the sniffles. That'd be ..." Just like Harold, honestly, to take credit for something the Hand had done to him and throw it back in Ward's face. He wasn't sure why anything his father did surprised him anymore.

"Typical," Danny finished for him, with something closer to a grimace than a smile.

"Yeah."

"Getting sick isn't your fault. This or anything else. You can _always_ tell me. We can always stop if we need to. Especially if the alternative is you killing yourself trying to keep up with me." Danny's voice hitched slightly on the last sentence.

"I know." It surprised him that he believed it. "It's ... not really on purpose. Just habit, I guess." Picking at the edge of the flatbread, he added, spurred on by a suspicion, "In K'un Lun, I guess they didn't really do sick days, with all the ... training, and whatever."

"No," Danny said, with a ghost of a smile. "No, sick days weren't really a thing in K'un Lun." Their eyes met; it was the same kind of understanding as that night at the dojo. _I've seen that same dragon._

Ward was the one who cracked up first, and then Danny grinned, looking away. "We're such a mess," Ward said. He swung his legs off the bed. "You know, as much as I'd like to sleep more, if I sleep all afternoon I'm going to be wide awake tonight."

"No more mountain climbing today," Danny said quickly. He leaned forward, moving to take the bowl, but stopped short of helping Ward off the bed when Ward glowered at him.

Ward got up on his own, carefully. "No mountain climbing," he said when his equilibrium had stabilized. "I was more thinking we could just kind of look around the village a little. I can sit down if I need to," he added when Danny reverted back to his worried look. "You can go up and check out the carvings on your own if you'd rather; I can just find a bench in the sunshine or something."

"The carvings will still be there tomorrow. I'd love to look around the village with you, Ward."

 

***

 

The sun was slanting through the village's tin-roofed stone houses, bathing everything in golden light. It looked like it should be in a painting, and it occurred to Ward that he could learn to paint, if he wanted to.

They soon acquired the predictable swarm of small children fascinated with Danny, who showed them an appearing/vanishing rock trick that delighted them. "Lei-Kung used this to illustrate the impermanence of the physical world during our training," he remarked to Ward. "I used to think it was actual magic -- I mean, considering some of the things I saw there, it's not that far-fetched." He grinned. "Or maybe it _is_ magic. How do you know it's not?"

"It's in your other hand," Ward said.

Danny spread his fingers. "Nope."

"Okay, you just switched it back to the first hand."

Danny opened his hand to show the pebble nestled in his palm. "Want to learn?" He tossed the pebble to Ward. "Or see if you can figure it out on your own."

"I can't believe you're showing me magic tricks."

"Excuse _you,_ it's a mystical demonstration of one of the underlying truths of the Buddhist cosmos. At least according to Lei-Kung."

They sat on a wall in the late afternoon sunshine -- there was already a biting chill in the air; Ward was glad of his jacket -- and Danny walked him through the rock trick: folding his hands over Ward's, showing him how to slip the stone from one hand to the other.

"Hey," Ward said quietly. "I'm sorry I scared you."

"Not your fault. Just -- _tell_ me. You know. Next time. Deal?"

"Deal," Ward said, and Danny grinned that little-kid grin, and caught the pebble when Ward tossed it to him.


End file.
